Political Institutions, Coercive Diplomacy, and the Duration of Economic Sanctions

A theory of sanction duration that focuses on differences between democratic and nondemocratic states in the structure of leaders’ support coalitions is tested, using a hazard model to analyze a data set of 47 sanction events with 272 observations. Results show that leadership change strongly affects the duration of sanctions only in the case of nondemocratic states. Leadership change in democratic states is unrelated to the duration of sanctions; however, leadership change in nondemocratic sender and nondemocratic target states is strongly related to the ending of economic sanctions.